Riding the Narwhal: Ars reviews Unity in Ubuntu 11.04

Ars reviews Unity in Ubuntu 11.04.

Ubuntu 11.04, codenamed Natty Narwhal, rose from the depths last week. The update brings a number of significant new features to the Linux-based operating system. It includes a much-improved refresh of the Unity shell and a number of other significant improvements throughout the application stack.

This is the first version of Ubuntu to ship with Unity on the desktop. Due to the far-reaching nature of the changes that accompany the transition to a new desktop shell, this review will focus almost entirely on Unity and how it impacts the Ubuntu user experience. We will also look at how Unity compares with GNOME 3.0 and the classic GNOME experience.

Unity

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth first unveiled Unity roughly a year ago during his keynote address at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Belgium. It was originally introduced as a lightweight shell tailored for netbooks and other small form-factor devices. It shipped as the default user interface in the Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition, but was met with a lukewarm reception. It showed a lot of promise, but its appeal at that time was diminished by performance issues and a general lack of maturity.

At the latest Ubuntu Developer Summit, which was held in Florida six months ago, Shuttleworth announced plans to bring Unity to the desktop. The goal was to unify Ubuntu's desktop and netbook experiences with a single software environment capable of holding its own against proprietary competitors. In order to meet that ambitious goal, Unity's developers spent the duration of the Natty cycle overhauling the shell. They have resolved the performance problems and have closed many of the feature gaps that detracted from Unity's quality in 10.10.

Ubuntu 11.04 pulls together years of Ubuntu usability enhancement efforts—including Unity and the much-improved panel system that has gradually emerged from the Ayatana project—and ties them together to deliver a rich and highly cohesive desktop experience. Although the result is compelling, there are still a lot of rough spots and limitations that chafe along the environment's edges. Some parts—such as the application lens—seem awkward, poorly designed, and incomplete.

The Unity dock

The default Ubuntu 11.04 desktop consists of a left-hand vertical dock and a top-mounted global menubar. The dock serves as a task management interface and a launcher for regularly used applications. It is functionally similar to the Mac OS X dock and Windows 7 task switcher.

The dock is dark and semi-transparent, like a sheet of black glass. A single column of colored tiles is displayed on top of the dock's surface. Each tile is adorned with an icon that indicates the tile's respective function. The tiles can represent launchers, running applications, or Unity lenses.

Clicking a launcher in the dock will bring forward the desired application or initiate it if it is not already running. A small sigil is shown to the left of tiles that are associated with applications currently running. Each application gets only one tile—multiple windows are signified by additional sigils next to the tile. An arrow will show up to the immediate right of the tile associated with the application that has active focus.

You can add a persistent launcher to the dock by dragging one in or by right-clicking a running application tile and toggling the "keep in launcher" option in the context menu. You can also use that context menu toggle item to remove something—you can't just pull an icon out to remove it like you can in OS X.

So far, all of this behavior is relatively obvious and intuitive to users who have had previous experience with dock-style task management interfaces. Where Unity starts to look different is in its approach to handling task overflow.

Task overflow

When the number of task tiles exceeds the available space in the dock, the bottom tiles will begin to collapse into a 3D pile. You can expand the pile by moving your cursor over the dock. When the collapsed tiles are expanded, you can position your cursor at the top or bottom to scroll up or down through the dock's contents. This collapsing mechanism works pretty well in practice and gives you good visual cues.

You can still sort of see the stacked tiles well enough to get a clear sense of how many total items there are in the dock. You can also move the cursor in at a specific point in the stack to make it expand out at that item, thus avoiding unnecessary scrolling. For example, to get quick access to the trash icon or the lenses when the dock is flattening out items, you can just move the cursor over the dock at the very bottom of the screen—this will make the dock contents expand up rather than down.

Managing applications with multiple windows

One of the weakest areas of the Unity dock in 11.04 is its poor support for managing applications with multiple windows. When you click a tile associated with an application that has multiple windows open, all of the application's windows will be brought to the front. If any are minimized, they will all be restored. There is no obvious way to activate or restore a single specific window—it's always all or nothing. This behavior ends up being tremendously frustrating during real-world use and will leave some users pining for the more flexible legacy task switcher in GNOME 2.x.

To work around that limitation, you will find yourself dumping windows on other workspaces just to keep them out of your way when you use the dock. You can also work around the problem by using the alt+tab keyboard combination for window switching. If you use that keyboard shortcut to select a specific window, it will be brought to the front by itself and won't drag forward all of its siblings.

Windows 7 and Mac OS X both provide tangibly better solutions for enabling management of applications with multiple windows from their respective docks. OS X will create a separate icon in the dock for each minimized window, making it really easy for you to restore one individually and see all of your minimized windows at a glance. Microsoft's solution is arguably even more elegant. When you hover your cursor over an icon in the Windows 7 taskbar, it will pop up thumbnails representing each associated window, allowing you to click one to bring it forward or click a thumbnail's "x" icon to close a window without even having to restore it or bring it to the front.

Now, it's worth noting that Unity also has a thumbnail window switcher that can be invoked on a specific application—but it doesn't solve all the same problems. When you click the dock tile of an application that is already active, Unity will initiate an Exposé-style display of all the windows associated with that application. You can click one to bring it to the front. It's a bit similar to the behavior that you get when you click and hold an application icon in the OS X taskbar.

The problem with this per-application Exposé mechanism in Unity is that it only works on the currently active application, which means that you have already brought forward and restored all of the application's windows before you even use it. It's a useful feature by itself, but it doesn't address the need to able to activate an individual minimized window without bringing forward and restoring all of the windows of the associated application.

There is also a global, Exposé-style window picker, but it doesn't help with the previously described problem case because it doesn't show minimized windows at all. It would be nice to see that rectified in future versions, perhaps by showing the minimized window thumbnails separately like Apple does in Snow Leopard.

158 Reader Comments

I want to say up front that the application lens interface is the single worst part of the Unity environment. In fact, it's a serious contender for the worst piece of desktop shell design since Microsoft Bob.

These are strong words, but having used this POS interface, I have to agree. I couldn't actually find applications through this thing.

And personally, I think the global menubar is a huge step backwards. Or off a cliff. Whatever direction MacOSX is from sanity. And why doesn't that silly dock on the left display words the way that Windows 7's taskbar can? Names are far more descriptive than icons.

I have installed 11.04 for some users now and all were totally desperate to go back to the "classic" layout. Even explaining Unity didn't help at all.

I totally agree that the old "desktop full of icons you can't see behind a pile of overlapping windows with a menubar in each of them" metaphor is ripe to die. But *this* is complex, not intuitive and creates new problems without really solving old ones. It is too complex in some places and too simple in others.

I'm a bit surprised that I even don't want to bother with Unity at all. It's a trainwreck of an UI. Usually I like to explore new UIs, but this is just... broken.

I sincerely believe Unity is the right way to go if Linux distros want to be up-to-date with the trends. One power that Ubuntu has over Windows and MacOS X might be exactly this: be more flexible and provide alternative solutions (especially UI) for the market faster.

Cool. Can it recognize my on-board wifi adapter without me needing to do shit in the command line for three days now? Still no?Ok.

Dell branded Broadcom card? Yeah I have had issues with those for years and Ubuntu. This is why I always get the Intel upgrade option if there is one. If not... newegg.

And why is everyone all sandy vag over global menubars? Is it really so hard to wrap your mind around how they work? Yea its different but its not "a step backwards or off a cliff". For the most part I prefer global menubars and I am a PC user 90% of the time to boot.

I've played with it. Performance was good. Functionality was terrible. I couldn't quite put my finger on why global menus didn't feel as good as they do on OS X, but the review explains it for me - OS X apps, of course, are designed to have global menus from day one. Shoehorning them into Linux is not the best way to go about getting a similarly comfortable experience. This software was written to have a menu bar in each window, and so it's always going to feel more comfortable that way. I doubt many app authors will be happy with major modifications to make it work better with Unity when distros like Fedora and OpenSUSE are taking the GNOME 3 route - which path do they follow?

Also, hiding the menubar until you hover over it is a usability disaster. I've used Ubuntu before, I've used Ubuntu Software Centre before, but I consistently failed to remember that it has menus for configuration of repositories. I suppose I'd get used to it eventually, but it's not going to be good for less computer-literate people at all.

I also didn't like the mess that is the panel, with the obtrusive tile backgrounds and the mishmash of launchers, running apps and various meta-functions like workspaces and lens summoners. It just doesn't make any conceptual sense to me.

That said, I've pretty much bought into the conceptual vision of GNOME 3, so maybe I'm just not in a position to judge Unity fairly. What does bother me is that Canonical are creating a third desktop environment, and that's not going to do anything to at all to help application developers figure out what they should be doing or designing for. And also, having two completely separate implementations of Unity sounds like a disgusting mess waiting to happen. Maybe they'll migrate completely to the Qt one in the future.

Maybe they'll even figure out how to make Qt apps look nice. You never know...

It seems Ubuntu is on a good track separating itself from Linux ecosystem, and it would be a shame if this is fuelled by press.

Given that you have to dig around a lot in their website to see the word 'Linux', they're definitely on that path. I used to support them for doing a lot of good work on hardware integration and suchlike, but now they're doing too much of their own thing for me to be comfortable with. I know it's Free Software, but we're not a big enough force to accomodate further splits within our limited market share very well.

It seems Ubuntu is on a good track separating itself from Linux ecosystem, and it would be a shame if this is fuelled by press.

Given that you have to dig around a lot in their website to see the word 'Linux', they're definitely on that path. I used to support them for doing a lot of good work on hardware integration and suchlike, but now they're doing too much of their own thing for me to be comfortable with. I know it's Free Software, but we're not a big enough force to accomodate further splits within our limited market share very well.

The problem here is not fragmentation of UI developement (and this ties in with your previous post). Its the incompatability with other distributions and lack of upstream development.

There are more then two desktop environments as you mention, and even more window managers. None of this "hurts" Linux. You can install any distribution and slap any WM on top of it. What Canonical is doing is developing something for their own use only. And that is not good.

"After doing a fresh installation on release day, I have only seen Unity crash once"

I went back to Windows from Ubuntu during the 10.10 release cycle - when they stop pushing out beta-quality software and calling it a release (read this article again with an eye towards "stuff that should be stable and polished in a full release of your software" if you disagree with me), I'll consider going back.

Unity is a good step in the right direction for Ubuntu, but it's going to take at least one more cycle to really get it right. They have done some incredibly impressive work so far and have delivered a desktop that is suitable for day-to-day use, but it is still very far from fulfilling its full potential.

Quote:

There are only two other bugs I have encountered since the release. One is that the top panel will sometimes spontaneously stop rendering...

Yes, another unfinished release of Unusable Ubuntu, who'd have thought?! Every release is a step in the right direction but needs another cycle to be finished, and needs to have show stopping bugs addressed. Before someone posts something along the lines of "the top panel spontaneously stopping rendering doesn't matter", don't be silly, a part of the UI just giving up rendering really does matter. It also goes to show the staggering quality of the release if they couldn't be bothered to fix that one! I dread to think what disfunctionality lurks just out of immediate sight.

"After doing a fresh installation on release day, I have only seen Unity crash once"

I went back to Windows from Ubuntu during the 10.10 release cycle - when they stop pushing out beta-quality software and calling it a release (read this article again with an eye towards "stuff that should be stable and polished in a full release of your software" if you disagree with me), I'll consider going back.

If stability is so important you should only run Ubuntu LTS releases. And wait a month before migrating to them so any bugs that slip through QA get fixed. I distinctly remember having problems with OSX 10.6.x until .3 with SMB, and Windows is not great until SP1 etc. I know LTS is not _inherently_ more stable at shipping, but over the lifetime of the product it gets better and better until you force yourself to reboot every 3 or 4 months. I find Ubuntu improves more in stability over its LTS lifetime than Windows or OSX.

I run LTS releases exclusively on servers and desktop and I bet Unity is fixed or ditched by the time 12.04 LTS comes around. Until then 10.04 is fantastic. And before someone mentions the pulse audio mess in 10.04 LTS well it did get fixed too.

I wonder if I am one of the few people who still use "Focus follows mouse." It is a disaster with global menus because when you swipe the mouse up to the menu bar, it changes if you happen to pass over another window.

The new scrollbars aren't system-wide, the Terminal, Firefox and LibreOffice have conventional scrollbars, infact the ones in the Terminal are so black that you can't even see them at first glance. Unity 2D is much better and feels more built together than the mess that Unity is, it even has basic translucency and shadows.

Hiding the menu bar by default, and only showing it on mouseover is a giant pile of WTF. You have to mouse to the top of the screen, figure out what you want to click, then mouse over to it, versus just mousing over to what you actually wanted in the first place. And the benefit to this extra work? You get some blank space in a bar that's always displayed.

Excellent review and seems to hit all the biggest complaints I have about Unity.I really think Ubuntu is on the right track here, and Unity is, IMO, exactly the kind of clean break which is needed.

That said, the App lens is ludicrous; even if I understand exactly how it functions it requires between four and five clicks to get to applications (or using the keyboard). The search features are good and work nicely, but the "Graphical" part of the GUI can't be left to rot in this way.Open up the app lens and get introduced to a world of confusion. Popularly used apps (which should be in the dock anyway), a few of the "all apps", and a few apps from repositories, all displayed on an equal footing. To select a group of apps ("games" for instance) I have to traverse half the screen diagonally, click, move the mouse again and click again.Not good design. An "app lens" concept could work, but the category selection needs to show a visual connection to the group of applications shown, and needs to integrate into the workflow (click on app lens, that opens, next to the app lens are vertically stacked categories and a search field in that stack, next to that on the right side is the group of programs that has been selected.) If "apps available for download" are to be displayed at all they should be clearly separated visually and logically (through distance, size, colour, contrast... something like that) from those already installed.

The global menubar. Yeah, sure (if well done). Why not.DISAPPEARING MENU ITEMS??? SERIOUSLY?Fitts' law applies to targets which a user can aim at to begin with. Not all programs have the same menu items, so a user needs to memorise ALL menu items from ALL programs he/she uses so that the benefit of stable location kicks in. Not going to happen. Keep it visible, and figure out another way of displaying the program name (which has to be displayed as the global menubar has now become the primary indicator of which program is active).

Default dock items... yeah, what Ryan said.

The file browser behaviour is weird when coupled with the dock. The "Home folder" icon has become the primary way of getting to the file browser, yet if one instance is open and you have navigated away from the home folder then clicking the "home folder" icon will not navigate that window to the home folder or open a new file browser window at the home folder.Names are important for understanding behaviour, so either this behaviour needs changing or the name of the panel needs to be renamed to something like "File browser" (or, you know, just go all the way and call it "finder"....

Some of the icons also need work, nothing obvious about the app lens or the ubuntu software centre, and the coloured backgrounds for all icons does not improve anything. In fact, turning that off and setting it so that only active apps have a background colour is much more obvious, and cleans up the dock quite a bit.

I could write a whole article about this (which would be somewhat better than this crappy and un-edited post) as I am a usability analyst and interaction designer, but I just wanted to add my voice to the (mostly constructive) criticism of Unity. I think that if they continue what they've been doing and continue to show this fearlessness in throwing out the broken (even if it was a part of their design) then Ubuntu is going to be absolutely fantastic. I like the direction, I love the ideas, but the implementation is a work in progress.

If stability is so important you should only run Ubuntu LTS releases. And wait a month before migrating to them so any bugs that slip through QA get fixed. I distinctly remember having problems with OSX 10.6.x until .3 with SMB, and Windows is not great until SP1 etc. I know LTS is not _inherently_ more stable at shipping, but over the lifetime of the product it gets better and better until you force yourself to reboot every 3 or 4 months. I find Ubuntu improves more in stability over its LTS lifetime than Windows or OSX.

I run LTS releases exclusively on servers and desktop and I bet Unity is fixed or ditched by the time 12.04 LTS comes around. Until then 10.04 is fantastic. And before someone mentions the pulse audio mess in 10.04 LTS :) well it did get fixed too.

To clarify, I had been running Ubuntu for a couple years before I ditched it, and some other Linux distros (primarily openSUSE) before that. When it's a toss up whether your video card will work properly, or your wireless, or suspend and/or hibernate when the next update comes in six months (irrespective of whether they worked before, or whether the release is supposed to be more stable), I'm not happy. When you release a half-baked version of your new software missing parts of its designed functionality (including decent configuration options), I'm not happy. Ubuntu has made me unhappy for a while (and "improves more in stability over its lifetime" I read as code for "is so much worse to begin with that it has more room to improve").

I haven't had any problems with the app lens. I don't understand why you're getting hysterical over it. It's for infrequently used apps. There's no reason to make infrequently used apps quickly accessible.

I too fail to see the "better" in the change to Unity. Dash is simply not workable, and Launcher is a waste of non-configurable space. Call me a Gnome guy, but I was back to "Classic" after five minutes.

The UI is not what's preventing further desktop adoption to Linux, and Unity in now way will further it.

That's nice. How do I run the last Ubuntu LTS release on my new Sandy Bridge ThinkPad? If your answer involves apt-pinning or upgrading to a Natty kernel and Xorg through a PPA, it doesn't count. By the time you get through that mess and figure out whatever other packages are required to make everything work again (probably including a new compiz), you might as well pick up Natty.

By Linux standards, Windows 7 is an impressive achievement: an operating system from 2009 on hardware released in 2011. How do they do that?

I'm having issues with Java applications (IntelliJ) crashing the window decorator (leaving no window decorations) and preventing the dock from hiding. Seems to be similar problems with NetBeans etc.

Anyway, I think Ubuntu deserves more coverage than other releases. Linux UI development is generally very slow (Gnome 2.x is how old?) and Ubuntu deserve credit for innovating. They haven't quite pulled it off (agree with the criticisms in the article) but it still a major achievement to get it out at all IMHO.

If you want a small example of my beef with Unity (slash the Ubuntu way of doing things), consider my experience the 10.10 release of Unity (as I said, I ditched it afterward): I am not a workspaces person - I don't like them, don't use them, and they get in the way of my normal workflow by hiding my windows - disagree if you like, but that's my usage. Unity forced me to waste a chunk of my limited netbook screen space on a workspace switcher (I liked Linux because I could make it do things my way, not the distributor's). Furthermore, to change the number of workspaces down to 1 (I could imagine workspace-using people being unhappy with the default of 4, too), the only way I could find was to change a gconf key - sure, fine, I actually kind of liked the workspace switcher as a one-space Expose-type view. I rebooted, and Unity had changed it back to 4. I wrote a shell script to set the key for me, set it to run on startup, and ... Unity changed it back to 4. (This was one thing, the shell was also slow, and often got stuck in its scrolling view - from the review here, only the first of those seems to have been fixed)

I also agree with bmastenbrook about not being able to stay on the LTS releases ... Linux seems to drop support for older hardware, but never have good support for newer, and as I don't have exactly the same hardware configuration as the distributors ...

I haven't had any problems with the app lens. I don't understand why you're getting hysterical over it. It's for infrequently used apps. There's no reason to make infrequently used apps quickly accessible.

The dock will contain a few core programs/shortcuts that I need all the time, but that's not all I use each day.

Infrequent use only means that not EVERY program will be used every day; it does NOT mean that NONE of the programs will be used each day. Meaning that I may use 1-10 of the programs in the "all programs" list every day, but I won't be using the same 1-10 programs each day. That means that the App Lens itself is likely to be used 1-10 times a day, and is therefore a frequent task which should be efficient and clear to use. That is why the App Lens should be on the dock in the first place. If you are a heavy computer user you will probably start using the search feature more, but the graphical interface has to support new users, light users, and exploratory use (for instance, when you don't know the name of what you're looking for)

The interface just isn't logically organized, it is unclear and unhelpful. It can be done much better, more logically, more clearly and more efficiently.

The unity UI makes some sense on a small 16:9 display (On my 16:9 laptops with small screens I have always kept the "taskbar" at the left side of the screen) but how does it work on a large, especially multi-monitor, desktop? The global menubar looks like it would be a huge pain on something like a 30" display, and I cant even imagine how it or the left side icon bar works on a multi monitor desktop.

Maybe I am just weird in that I think of a computer as the applications. Obviously I need the OS to make it work, but as far as interface I want the non-application parts to stay out of my way and have everything as clear, clean and simple as possible.

Alt-tab is just the right way to picking an active app. Taskbars, docks with popup previews? Why? It is so infrequent that I don't know what I have open on my machine at any one time. Why do I need to know more than the name of the app and title?

My feeling is usability is always talked about but in reality, its an afterthought to making something cool, pretty and then, Oh yeah how can we make it usable now? Why not start with what makes the OS the most usable and then how should i look to support that?

My example would be transparency. In almost all cases where it is used, its just there to be cool. To me it is distracting visual noise. Oh look I can make out my blurred desktop wallpaper.

I am not an Apple guy, but I think Apple does it better in some places. I notice it in their transitions. The transitions give reasonable visual clues as to what is happening in a way 7, Linux do not seem to capture. Those little touches make it feel more intuitive and relaxing to use.

By Linux standards, Windows 7 is an impressive achievement: an operating system from 2009 on hardware released in 2011. How do they do that?

It's amazing what one can accomplish with 90% market share . . .

BS. It's got nothing to do with market share and everything to do with a conscious decision on the part of the kernel and Xorg developers not to support a stable API and ABI that would allow drivers to be developed and delivered out of tree. Where third party driver developers have worked around this (e.g. Nvidia), you can use newer hardware on older distributions, but that has its own problems. If your hardware has open source drivers, you're stuck with the latest and greatest that your distribution has to offer - if they offer something that works at all.

I have 11.04 installed on my three systems, and use it daily as my primary OS.

It works, it's reliable. I agree that the lenses need more work - but I've added and removed icons from the dock and know the names of my less frequently used apps and that takes care of that. I find it's less necessary to take my hands off the keyboard with Unity that with the previous Gnome desktop.

GUIs are rapidly-evolving beasts. The best GUIs of yesterday are objects of scorn today, and it won't be long before we will look back at the best GUIs of today and heap scorn on them. Someday the industry will hit upon the single, universally-agreed-upon-and-loved GUI paradigm. However, I am not sure that will occur before the sun collapses into a white dwarf.

My point is that *all* GUIs suck - they just differ from each other in the particular ways they suck. So, if you're seeking computer-usage nirvana that means you have to either a) give up computers, or b) go back to a text console, or c) adapt to what's in front of your eyes.

Me? I adapt. I've used all the GUIs over the years, and have always managed to get done what needs to get done. I suspect you could too - if you tried.

Maybe I am just weird in that I think of a computer as the applications. Obviously I need the OS to make it work, but as far as interface I want the non-application parts to stay out of my way and have everything as clear, clean and simple as possible.

Alt-tab is just the right way to picking an active app. Taskbars, docks with popup previews? Why? It is so infrequent that I don't know what I have open on my machine at any one time. Why do I need to know more than the name of the app and title?

My feeling is usability is always talked about but in reality, its an afterthought to making something cool, pretty and then, Oh yeah how can we make it usable now? Why not start with what makes the OS the most usable and then how should i look to support that?

My example would be transparency. In almost all cases where it is used, its just there to be cool. To me it is distracting visual noise. Oh look I can make out my blurred desktop wallpaper.

I am not an Apple guy, but I think Apple does it better in some places. I notice it in their transitions. The transitions give reasonable visual clues as to what is happening in a way 7, Linux do not seem to capture. Those little touches make it feel more intuitive and relaxing to use.

Anyway, yeah - I am sticking with Mint.

I wish I could say that you are completely wrong, but......Transparency is seldom useful, and is used exactly in the manner you mention (i.e. gratuitously).But some of the other stuff has other facets.Did you know that general users view the GUI as completely mouse driven, and don't even know about alt-tab? I know it seems scary, but to the general user it is quite enough to learn to understand what is being presented on-screen and how to manipulate that with the mouse. Taskbars and dock prevew pop-ups are good for those 90% of the market. We, the nerds who may have custom key bindings, are another group. A UI aiming at a general audience must try to cater to both groups, and to support moving from the beginner group to the advanced group (visibility of features AND visibility/explanation of shortcuts and other power-features).

That would be useful if it wasn't almost entirely redundant with the stuff that I already have in my dock

I disagree that this isn't useful, and judging by your screenshot, the statement is false anyway. I'm pretty sure I'm only counting 3 that are overlap.

This feature is similar to the way the win7 start menu works, which I find very useful. If I use an app 3 times a week, it'll remain on the frequently used list and I don't have to browse and scroll all programs (or search), if I use something ALL the time, I pin it to the dock.

What I don't recall is if pinned items also appear in the frequently used list, I don't think they do, but I'm in front of an XP box right now.

So maybe the solution is to not show docked items in the frequently used list.

I haven't upgraded to 11.04 yet. I keep looking at it and just keep going "oh, maybe tomorrow." I tried the beta 2 version just to play with Unity, to see if I liked it any better actually using it than looking at reviews, and I wasn't impressed. The app lens is amazingly horrible and makes it ridiculously tedious and difficult for me to find what I'm looking for, and the global menu, while awesome on a netbook or for someone who regularly uses things maximized, for my regular use of virtually never maximizing windows are just annoying. I have a feeling that when I finally do upgrade, I'll be sticking to classic for right now, and if a lot of things aren't improved in 11.10, I may be jumping ship entirely. Of course, I find Gnome 3.0 even more annoying than Unity, so who knows.